But sometimes people have nostalgia for the past—perhaps yearning for Cold War-era computing, when the harsh glow of a 9-inch CRT monitor represented the pinnacle of technology (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: This 1984 black-and-white Macintosh cost approximately $5500 in 2019 dollars, which will buy approximately 10 economy-priced laptops in the year 2019.

Proposal:

Modern monitors should have an option to emulate the behavior of various old display types.

For example, a high-resolution monitor could easily pretend to be the following:

A 1950s tube television

The tiny black-and-white screen of the 1984 Macintosh (Figure 2)

The monochromatic green display of the Apple //(Figure 3)

Fig. 2: In “Mac ’84 mode,” only a tiny fraction of the screen is used (left), in order to give the user that authentic 9-inch-screen experience. (The blue area represents an unusable border region.)

Fig. 3: Apple // mode. After a while, you actually stop noticing that the whole display is green!

Conclusion:

Now that a “Dark Mode” theme has been implemented by nearly every operating system vendor, the next arms race is sure to be “retro display mode” or “retro CRT filter” mode.

PROS: Gives people a greater appreciation of modern technology.

CONS: May cause eyestrain.

Supplemental Fig. S1: The actual number of pixels on a 2018 27″ iMac is 5120×2880 (14,745,600), as compared to 512×342 (175,104) on the original Mac. That’s 84.2 times more pixels, or 252 times more pixels if you count the R, G, B channels separately!

In the United States, certain classes of business receive a substantial amount of their total revenue in the form of tips. Restaurants are probably the most common example.

However, now that a huge fraction of transactions are done by credit card or phone, it has become feasible for additional businesses to get in on the tip-collecting process (tip-collecting tablet example in Figure 1).

Fig. 1: A lunch truck or takeout restaurant might have a tablet like this one. If designed properly, the user interface should subtly persuade the customer to click one of the tip buttons.

For example, previously, a lunch truck might have had an anemic tip jar—obviously a repurposed peanut butter jar—with 87 cents in it. But now, that same truck can just put a button labeled “TIP: 15%” on their electronic checkout screen, and a substantial fraction of patrons will select that option.

As a thought experiment, consider how many people would tip two dollars on a $10 burrito cash transaction (very few), then compare that to the number of people who would click the “20%” button on an electronic checkout (many more).

(Please appreciate the high-quality market research that went into the preceding sentence.)

The issue:

While the best part of this system is that it allows a normally non-tip-based or non-service business to get tips, there are still stubborn holdout customers who will not include (for example) a 25% gratuity for an oil change, or when buying tomatoes at a grocery store, or when paying a traffic ticket.

But there is still a way to persuade these individuals!

Proposal:

In order to incentivize people to click the tip button (instead of just the “checkout: NO TIP” button), we can simply have a secondary screen that shows the tip amount.

People might object to this brazen attempt to shame them for not including a tip, so we will disguise it a bit by calling it an “Order Confirmation” screen, and using it to provide a customer transaction number (i.e., it is a supplement to the normal “your order is number 326, your burrito will be ready when that number is called” process).

Fig. 2: Here, we see a checkout counter with the tablet from Figure 1 at the bottom, and a helpful order confirmation screen at the top, showing off a customer’s generosity to other patrons along with a reminder of their order number.

Conclusion:

People might object to having the full dollar value of their transaction visible on the “confirmation screen,” so we could potentially show only the tip percentage rather than the full value.